Fouad Ajami makes a monstrous argument in defending remarks Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told servicemembers in Iraq that ““The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked.”
Our country made its way to Iraq some 18 months after 9/11 because the menace against America in that time of peril had come from Arab lands. It was Arab financiers who made it possible for the plotters and the death pilots to do their grim work. It was Arab religious preachers, with the prestige of the Arabic language, the language of the Islamic revelation, who were sowing the winds of anti-Americanism and “weaponizing” the faith itself. And it was sly Arab governments winking at the forces of terror and enabling it while posing as America’s clients and allies. We had to get the attention of the Arabs, strike against Arab targets, take on the pathologies of that world.
This justification of war in Iraq, as collective punishment against Arabs who are guilty by mere circumstances of birth, at least has the virtue of being honest. Richard Cohen admitted in 2008 that “I wanted to go to “them,” whoever “they” were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us. One of “them” was Saddam Hussein,” but at least he had the common decency to feel remorse for it. And of course, who can forget Jonah Goldberg shrugging that, “The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense.”
Matt Duss notes that there is a “similarity” between Ajami’s argument and those made by Osama bin Laden justifying the killing of civilians, but the arguments aren’t “similar.” They are the same. The essence of al Qaeda’s ideology is collective punishment, inflicted on Western societies as recompense for the deaths of Muslims abroad. Bin Laden argued in 2002, “the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.”
This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.
As Ajami believes that attacking “Arab targets” is necessary to “take on the pathologies of that world,” so did bin Laden believe that slaughtering American civilians was necessary because ” “America does not understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing it using the language it understands.” Pathologizing the other is key to barbarism, to abandoning proportionality. Once an entire people is guilty “justice” is easily attainable, since it can be extracted from any member of any group, regardless of how individually culpable they might be. Ajami and bin Laden are in agreement about the moral basis for the use of force–they simply disagree over the proper target. Sadly, bin Laden’s monstrous argument is slightly more rational–it’s not as though the citizens of Arab nations have had much choice in the selection of their leaders or their policy decisions.
The tragic part is that Panetta is right, in an emotional sense. Iraq posed no imminent threat, it was not connected to al Qaeda, and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. But the war was made possible by the desire to lash out, to punish a collective “them” for the carnage of 9/11. I doubt however, that was what Panetta meant.